Seven Stones to Stand or Fall (Outlander)

Hal might have felt annoyed at Harry’s solicitousness, but his friend was—all too clearly—honestly worried for him. He drew breath and straightened his shoulders, admitting to himself that, in all honesty, he couldn’t dismiss that worry as unfounded. He was getting better, though. He had to—there was the devil of a lot of work to be done if he had any hope of getting the regiment on its feet and ready to fight. And Major Grierson was going to help him do it.

“There’s something else about hawthorn,” he said, as they reached Grierson’s door.

“What’s that?” Harry was wearing his bird-dog look, alert and intent on the prey to be flushed, and Hal smiled privately to see it.

“Well, the green of the leaves symbolizes constancy, of course, but the flowers are said to—and I quote—‘have the scent of a woman sexually aroused.’?”

Harry’s intent look switched instantly to the flowering twig in Hal’s hand. Hal laughed, brushed the flowers under his own nose, then handed them to Harry, turning to lift the brass boar’s-head knocker.

Good lord, it’s true. The whiff of insinuating musk so distracted him that he scarcely noticed when the door opened. How the devil could something smell…slippery? He closed his fist involuntarily, with the very disconcerting feeling that he had touched his wife.

“My lord?” The servant who had opened the door was looking at him with a slightly puzzled frown.

“Oh,” Hal said, snapping back to himself. “Yes. I am. I mean—”

“Major Grierson is expecting his lordship, I think?” Harry inserted himself between Hal and the inquiring face, which nodded obligingly and withdrew into the house, gesturing them to follow.

There were voices coming from the morning room to which they were escorted: a woman, and at least two men. Perhaps Grierson was married and his wife was accepting callers…?

“Lord Melton!” Grierson himself—a big, bluff-looking, sandy-haired chap—rose from a settee and came to meet him, smiling. Hal’s heart rose; he’d not met Grierson before, but his reputation was stellar. He’d served with a famous regiment of foot for years, fought at Dettingen, and was known as much for his organizational abilities as his courage. And organization was what the fledgling 46th needed, above all.

“So pleased to meet you,” Grierson was saying. “Everyone’s buzzing about this new regiment, and I want to hear all about it. Pansy, my dear, may I present his lordship, the Earl of Melton?” He half-turned, extending a hand to a small, darkly pretty woman of about his own age—which Hal estimated as thirty-five. “Lord Melton, my wife, Mrs. Grierson.”

“Charmed, Mrs. Grierson.”

Hal made a leg to Mrs. Grierson, who smiled at the attention—but his own attention was slightly distracted by Harry, behind him. Instead of advancing to be introduced and pay his own compliments, Harry had uttered a sort of throaty noise that might have been a growl in less-civil company.

Hal glanced in Harry’s direction, saw what Harry was seeing, and felt as though he’d been punched in the stomach.

“We’ve met,” said Reginald Twelvetrees, as Grierson turned to introduce him. Twelvetrees rose to his feet, cold-eyed.

“Indeed?” said Grierson, still smiling but now glancing warily between Hal and Twelvetrees. “I’d no idea. I trust you have no objection to Colonel Twelvetrees meeting with us, Lord Melton? And I trust that you, sir”—with a deferential nod to Twelvetrees—“have no objection to my inviting Colonel Lord Melton to join us?”

“Not in the slightest,” said Twelvetrees, with a twitch in one cheek that was by no means a token smile. Still, he sounded as though he meant that “not in the slightest,” and Hal began to feel a certain tightness in his chest.

“By all means,” he said coolly, meeting Twelvetrees’s stony gaze with one of his own. Reginald’s eyes were the same color that Nathaniel’s had been, a brown so dark as to seem black in some lights. Nathaniel’s had been black as pitch, facing him in the dawn.

Mrs. Grierson excused herself and went out, saying that she would have refreshments brought, and the men settled, in the uneasy fashion of seabirds jealous of their rocky perches.

“Quite to my surprise, gentlemen, I find myself in the enviable position of being a valuable commodity,” Grierson said, leaning affably forward. “As you may know, I fell ill in Prussia, was shipped home to recover, and fortunately did so. But it was a long convalescence, and by the time I was fit, my regiment had…well…I’m sure you know the general situation; I won’t go into the particulars just now.”

All three of his guests made small grunts of assent, with a few murmurs of decent sympathy. What had happened was that Grierson had been bloody lucky in falling ill when he did. There had been a truly scandalous mutiny a month after his removal to England, and when the mess had been cleaned up, half the surviving officers had been court-martialed, fifteen mutineers had been hanged, and the remnants dispersed to four other regiments. The original regiment had formally ceased to exist, and Grierson’s commission with it.

The normal thing for a man in his position to do would be to buy a commission in another regiment. But Grierson was, as he bluntly put it, a valuable commodity. Not only was he a very capable administrator and a good commander—he was popular, with other officers, with the War Office, and with the press.

Hal needed Grierson’s expertise; he needed even more Grierson’s connections. With Grierson on his staff, he could attract officers of a much higher caliber than he could do with money alone.

As to what Twelvetrees, colonel of a long established and very solid artillery regiment, might want with him, that was fairly obvious, too: he wanted Hal not to have Grierson.

“So, Lord Melton, tell me how things stand with you,” Grierson said, once they’d got stuck into the wine and biscuits that Mrs. Grierson had sent in. “Who are your staff officers, to begin with?”

Hal set down his glass carefully and told him, in a calm voice, exactly who they were. Competent men, so far as he knew—but almost all of them quite young, with no experience of foreign campaigns.

“Of course,” Harry put in helpfully, “that means that you would be quite senior in the regiment: have your pick of companies, postings, aides…”

“Just how many troops have you on your muster roll, Colonel?” Reginald didn’t bother trying to sound neutral, and Grierson glanced at him. Not with disapproval, Hal saw, and his heart sped up a little.

“I cannot tell you exactly, sir,” he said, with exquisite politeness. Sweat had begun to dampen his collar, though the room was cool. “We are conducting a major campaign of recruitment at the moment, and our numbers rise—substantially—each day.” On a good day, they might get three new men—one of whom would not abscond with the bounty for signing—and from the smirk on Twelvetrees’s face, Hal knew he was aware of this.

“Indeed,” said Twelvetrees. “Untrained recruits. The Royal Artillery is at full strength presently. My company commanders have been with me for at least a decade.”